Road rage over charging plans

There is a simple solution to the road and rail congestion chaos facing large parts of the UK which would also address the underlying environmental cost of transport and permit people the flexibility to manage their family life more readily: a requirement that all UK businesses ensure that one-fifth of their office workers on any one day work from home, not the office (Transport chief backs road-pricing schemes, December 1).

We have the technology to do this. Many people have the necessary IT in their homes, and businesses could assist those staff without the necessary equipment by ploughing in some of the savings they can make from renting smaller offices. The majority of commuting during the week is done by employees. The economic and environmental savings would be huge and such a scheme would unleash the huge yet hitherto unused power of IT to improve individuals' quality of life.

It's time our politicians did some creative thinking and linked up some of the issues facing our country by thinking "outside the box" for once.Paul Clements London

So "pricing on the roads offers potential benefits of up to £28bn each year in 2025". Using the Office for National Statistics' projections, that will amount to around £770 per driver, dwarfing current road-tax levels. There is some talk of using this money to replace road tax and fuel duty but why go to all that trouble if there is no net revenue benefit? The other arguments are also spurious: we already have an effective, working mechanism for taxation in proportion to miles driven, called fuel duty; the idea of charging more at congested times is meaningless, since nobody in their right mind drives in the rush hour unless they have to.

Given that to implement road pricing, the government will need to know who you are, where you are and when, it seems clear that the real motivation for this scheme is not any notion of fairness but the opportunity to ratchet up the level of national surveillance. I'd be really worried were it not for the government's reassuringly dismal record with major technology projects. Peter Cahill Leeds

So the government intends to untangle the roads from traffic jams by pricing motorists off the road. At £1 a mile for the average motorist that will cost around £10,000 per annum, if all journeys are taken at peak times on busy roads. Country dwellers like myself will still pay more for motoring even at lower tariffs for less-frequented roads because we have to use cars when there is poor public transport. Many people in Britain live in rural areas where incomes are lower and where jobs are scarce so road pricing is yet another tax on those with little money.

The rural poor will be priced off the road. Road pricing is a regressive tax and the effect will be to isolate individuals since travel will be too expensive. There will be a disincentive to work since the costs of travelling to work will rise. Travel by car will be only for the rich. Gwyn Price Evans Whitland, Dyfed

Until advanced schemes for road pricing can be implemented would it not be simpler to remove the road fund tax and replace it with an increase in petrol and diesel tax? Those who use roads the most would pay the most.Ray Battye Sheffield

The proposal to charge motorists for driving on the roads is an excellent initiative. A simple way of ensuring compliance would be to issue vehicle owners with some kind of "tax disc" which they could, for instance, display on their windscreens to prove that they had paid the charge. Some critics have expressed fears that the government might divert the revenue to other projects such as invading foreign countries, so that they would still not have enough money for road-building and would have to explore other approaches to raising the necessary funds. But that hardly seems likely.Michael Swan Didcot, Oxon